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anyway. what is good about early swans is this brutal depiction of a human soul that is simultaneously tortured/seduced/held captive by money, flesh, addiction, sex, desire, hatred, labour etc.
gira was unique in the way he did that. he wasn't revelling in it so much as exposing it. he wasn't trying to overcome it or enjoy it of some sense of macho hedonism. he was reducing it to this base level where it just became a monotonous grind. it wasn't about becoming an animal or destroying yourself, it was about how humanity was embedded in its own systems of brutality, how everyone was entangled in it - how desire could so easily become abuse, how desperation and money and addiction reduced us to these base drives. the important thing about this early stuff was how it depicts a world in which everyone is complicit, there's no position of innocence. every perspective facilitates the abuse. even the passive observer is guilty. obviously, this kind of truth CANNOT be tolerated in our contemporary hyper positive consumer culture.
to my knowledge, noone else has ever done anything like that. its rare for musicians of all people to explore an aesthetic in the way gira did.
i have no time for much of what they did after that, talking about love or play acting like some cosmic pervert. i dont find this stuff particularly interesting. there's also a big theistic vibe to it all which i dont like.
everything that the swans explored in their early days is a anathema to mainstream indie entertainment which is obsessed with a context free perspective of innocent hedonism, a symptom of which is the decline in criticism and the snarly bitching at anyone you can't sneer into doing what they're supposed to, which is shutting up and "just enjoying it, man".
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